Wyndham Lewis self-portrait, from when he could see
Many columnists are blind, but only metaphorically so. Charles Krauthammer and George Will are as eyeless as Samson, with a similar appetite for inflicting retributive mass slaughter on the residents of Gaza. But Russell Smith, the novelist whose cultural ruminations appear in the Globe and Mail, is actually blind, although thankfully only temporarily so. Smith has written a wry, jaunty column about his current sightless state. I’ve posted excerpts from the column at the end of this posting (The column can be found here; fair warning: the Globe usually yanks its online content after 2 weeks; Smith’s piece deserves e a longer afterlife.)
In his little essay, Smith discusses other writers who were blind or wrote about blindness: Joyce, Henry Green, Borges, and Milton. I was a bit surprised that Smith didn’t mention Wyndham Lewis, the great modernist novelist and painter who also lost his vision in old age; the omission was unexpected because the columnist’s father, the late literary critic Rowland Smith, wrote so well on Lewis.
The second in my apparently annual series of Yuletide mullings (last year’s “
